Improve Employee Productivity With Capacity Planning and Time Tracking

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at and who steals what is most precious to men—time.” As leaders of accounting firms, it’s our job not just to make sure that our own time is being used effectively but that our team is also making good use of their time.

One of the best ways to ensure your staff is working productively is through capacity planning. This process first defines the maximum amount of work a person (or organization) can take on and then provides an indicator of how close they are to that capacity.

However, you can only get an accurate sense of employee productivity for capacity planning if you have the right time-tracking methods in place. If your team isn’t tracking their time properly, it will negatively impact the data you use for capacity planning, which can cause a ripple effect that wreaks havoc on many other parts of the firm.

Here are a few of our most important tips for helping your team members track their time in a way that’s easy for them and allows you to maintain accurate data.

Support employee productivity with global time tracking

In today’s dynamic world of remote work and hybrid schedules, not every member of your team will work in the office all day, every day. In some cases, they may be working in a place where connectivity is limited, or it’s not convenient for them to use their normal work computer. Instead of having your team try to piece together the hours they worked after-the-fact or use difficult manual tracking methods, you should implement software tools that allow them to log hours from any location. Most of these tools will also allow your team members to go back into their time log and edit entries if necessary, letting them maintain accuracy even with an unstable internet connection.

Use standardized allocations for recurring projects

Almost every firm has a few different kinds of projects that they take on more frequently than others. It could be a specialization, or perhaps just a chance occurrence that you happen to get a lot of work of a particular type. Whatever the reason, don’t neglect the many advantages that come from doing the same kind of project repeatedly – especially when it comes to capacity planning and time tracking.

With repeated projects, you’ll have an understanding of how many hours are required, about how long the key project management milestones will take to complete, and how many team members need to be involved. Capacity planning is much easier when you have this kind of foundation to start from, and it also makes your employees more productive since they’ll have fewer questions about the nature of the project.

Solicit input from your team

We’ve run into lots of execs and firm owners who treat their staff like they can’t relate to them or glean any helpful information from them. At the end of the day, your team members are people too. They can also provide you with a unique perspective on what can help them be more productive or make better use of their time.

If your staff is too large to arrange one-to-one visits with every team member, consider using a survey or form software to create a centralized place where employees and contractors can share feedback about how their time is allocated and tracked, and whether or not there are blocks in their workflows that could easily be resolved. You might find that the information points you to the solution for a problem you didn’t even realize you had. Soliciting opinions from your team members also shows them that you value their input, which could help increase retention and minimize employee turnover – a huge bottleneck when it comes to capacity planning and maximizing the productivity of your staff.

Utilize time tracking

Every firm has to face unique challenges when it comes to getting the most from their internal team, or planning the use of resources for maximum efficiency. Yet these tasks can’t be neglected, as they are necessary if you want your firm to attain desired growth targets and run smoothly without any negative effects on your staff.

To streamline the way you handle employee time tracking and capacity planning, it’s best to incorporate these tasks into a larger software suite that can be integrated with the rest of your operation. By handling your time tracking and capacity planning in the same place as other critical tasks like project management and file sharing, you can increase the efficiency with which you analyze your firm’s key metrics. This gives you a stronger ability to act on and implement the time tracking and capacity planning observations you glean from analyzing data, which in turn will make your team more productive and happier at work.

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